Art and Art History

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    Unwrapping hidden histories : An analysis of redesigns at three international Egyptian exhibitions.
    (Wheaton College (MA), 2019) McIsaac, Hannah
    This thesis addresses the large variation in the recent redesigns of three international museums with permanent Egyptian collections: the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy; the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, Netherlands; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America. Through an analysis of the narratives each museum constructs, this thesis argues that these changes can represent a greater need for consistency in how museums address Egyptology as a discipline. The three case studies discussed here all take a different approach to their discussion of their own and a broader history, and the lack of a precedent makes it difficult to ensure that their changes are, at their core, successful. In order to preserve the sense of {esc}(3z{esc}(Bwonder{esc}(3y {esc}(Bin their visitors, comprehensive redesigns of exhibitions featuring Egyptian material culture must critically address institutional history and the effect of the discipline of Egyptology in both the past and the present.
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    Aaron Douglas and the Barnes Foundation : the complexities of racial identity.
    (Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.), 2015) Estrela, Sarah M.
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    Picturing Baltimore : a visual exploration of the city's movie theaters.
    (Wheaton College; Norton, Mass., 2011-11-28T16:27:57Z) Liss, Rosemary.
    Artist's Statement: My hometown of Baltimore has a reputation for homicides and heroin addicts, images that have been glorified through T.V. dramas like HBO's The Wire and NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street. Despite this depiction I find myself constantly standing up for Baltimore. I also am drawn to its decay and the constant flux of the urban landscape and see this shift as closely related to the people that live there. With the Baltimore riot of 1968, which occurred following Martin Luther King's death, most of downtown was abandoned. Although there has been much redevelopment since the 1980's, lasting effects of the riots can still be seen on the streets like North Avenue and Howard Street where rows of buildings remain abandoned. To investigate my own connection to the city and the temporality of the urban landscape I have chosen to paint old movie theaters. There is something beautiful about the chipped paint and boarded up windows. Many of these theaters, which at their height had been magnificent and full of life, have been abandoned and left to the natural elements. Others have been redeveloped to fit the needs of the surrounding neighborhood, becoming churches or pharmacies. I see the evolution as symbolic of the shifting patterns within the city. I paint intuitively allowing my instincts to dictate the way I handle the surface of the canvas. The energy that I put into the process informs my understanding of the subject matter. It is through the layering of color that I explore a tension between life and the once animated buildings. This relationship between the subject and the medium allows me to blur the line of history, breathing life back into my subjects.
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    Faces of power : visible agency of Florentine and Venetian leaders 1500-1600.
    (Wheaton College; Norton, Mass., 2011-11-28T16:12:16Z) Pfifferling, Jillian Muth.
    It is the aim of this thesis to examine what accounts for the difference between portraits of Florentine and Venetian leaders, as I believe they each have a distinct character. I will explore this subject through a comparison of the portraiture of sixteenth-century leaders from Venice and Florence and to detangle the social, political, and artistic structures revealed by these depictions. Portraits of Florentine and Venetian leaders are the product of the varied situations found in each city, which in turn determined the distinctive visual rhetoric seen in the subsequent visual products. Because of the increase in the number of portraits produced in both Florence and Venice in the sixteenth century, a comparative study seems à propos. Indeed, while Florence and Venice are two of the most central Renaissance locales, a lack of comparative studies between them is evident and my thesis will open a needed dialogue by using portraiture as a starting point. I first discuss the state of portraiture in the sixteenth-century, dealing with issues such as sitters, functions and meaning, as well as introducing the main courtly artists of the time period. In order to contextualize the paintings that I use as the crux of my comparative argument, I also examine the history of Florence and Venice, with a focus on the political and social structures of each locale. My main argument, thus, is a detailed comparative account of the ways in which portraits of the Medici patriarchs and the Venetian Doges highlight the distinctiveness of each government while both reflecting and intervening into the construction of power each ruler held in that government. Particularly, I believe that the notion of agency serves as an essential tool of comparison: while the Medici princes held great power in creating and controlling their self-image as well as determining their position, the identity of the Venetian Doges was appropriated by the state and self-fashioning abilities were restricted once they accessed power.
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    "All the splendors of the Chinese masters": Henri Matisse's interpretation of Chinese art.
    (Wheaton College; Norton, Mass., 2011-11-28T16:09:45Z) Piscetta, Dania.